West swimmer Keen has Olympics on his mind

IOWA CITY - Aidan Keen was in open study period when he received the September text message from his mother.

From no better person could the Iowa City West distance swimmer learn he had qualified for the 2016 United States Olympic Team Trials in swimming. His 200-meter freestyle time of 1 minute, 51.76 seconds was 13-hundredths of a second better than the cutoff.

'I was pretty shocked when I found out,” Keen said. 'I just kind of sat there staring at my phone with a slackjaw there for a couple minutes.”

The honor secures Keen an opportunity to compete for a coveted spot on the 2016 Olympic team. In the meantime, the West junior continues to train with the Iowa Flyers Swim Club in advance of the Winter Junior National Championships Dec. 10-13 in Federal Way (Wash.). He'll rejoin the West boys' swimming team in mid-December as it prepares to defend its boys' swimming state championship. The Trojans open the season Dec. 2 with a home dual against state runner-up Cedar Rapids Washington.

'We just want to try and get that same thing that we did last year,” Keen said. 'We want to try and win state again if we can. Even though we lost some good seniors, I think we've got the same pretty good group of guys and a lot of really good depth this year with the incoming freshmen.”

Keen leads a Trojans team that returns five of its six state qualifiers, a dominant group that won West its first boys' state championship with victories in seven of 11 events, the first team to eclipse the 200-point mark since Cedar Falls in 2006.

'Our focus is going to be, of course, to try to win the state championship,” West Coach Rob Miecznikowski said. 'Win as many individual and relays as possible, but we really have a good shot at breaking a couple of (state records) - (we) pretty-much can pick which state relays we want to try to break, the records.”

Keen claimed four gold medals at last year's state meet, with individual wins in the 200-yard freestyle and 500, plus the opening leg of the 400-yard freestyle and the anchor on the 200 free relays. Fellow junior Mark McGlaughlin also was a four-event winner, sprinting to individual gold in the 50 and 100 freestyle races, plus two relays.

'He can pretty much do anything,” Miecznikowski said of McGlaughlin. 'That's what's nice about our season, being we have so many opportunities to put the guys in different events and see kind of where they peak.”

Matt Anderson, Oliver Martin and Will Scott round out a loaded front-line roster of top-10 state placewinners for West, a group that also can lay claim to eight of 11 school records.

Miecznikowski hopes to build depth with impact freshmen breaststrokers Lane Griffis and Mason Wang, plus 'do-it-all” Jake Sharafudin to push the number of West state qualifiers to eight or 10 swimmers.

'When you've got this many guys that swim at this level all working together,” Miecznikowski said, 'there's very little that they can't accomplish if we just keep them together.”

l Comments: douglas.miles@thegazette.com